If anyone still considers making extension for emojis, EmojiOne is no longer a good choice. It has gone evil. No more free emojis from Emoji One.

EmojiOne version 3.0 changed license. Now the only thing you get for free are PNG images. PNG images are bigger than vector images and don't scale, making whole thing useless on modern websites. Vector images require premium license that costs $99 for personal use.

So what are alternatives?

1. Noto Emoji: https://github.com/googlei18n/noto-emoji
Created and maintained by Google. Repository is rather messy, icons are sorted by unicode character and there is no keywords map, but its very good.

2. Firefox OS Emoji: https://github.com/mozilla/fxemoji
Created and maintained by Mozilla. SVG images are available as final images and as layered images. Keywords are mixed together as large words, like u1F0CF-playingcardblackjoker instead of playing-card-black-joker, but its very much usable and well designed.

3. Twitter Emoji: https://github.com/twitter/twemoji
Created and maintained by Twitter. Available as SVG images, as premade PNG images. Icons are missing keywords map, but otherwise its another excellent alternative.

I've got to say that while I don't think Emojione is evil for changing their business model, the sudden change is a huge pain in my ass.

Mozilla's emoji are not actively maintained. As far as I know, the only two open source emoji sets being actively maintained are Twitter's Twemoji and Google's Noto emoji. Twemoji receives frequent updates and their smiley faces look nice but the persons emoji are less than awesome. Noto's updates seem tied to Android's updates, their persons emoji look nice but the smiley faces look old and are not round. Twemoji make their images available through a CDN but their naming schemes differs from Emojione and is arguably inconsistent with their inclusion of the U+FE0F codepoint. Noto files are not available through a CDN.

I'm considering forking either Twemoji or Noto with filenames that match Emojione for backward compatibility, but I need to check that it can be hosted by a free CDN such as cdnjs.

The issue with Noto is that the gradients make them look mushy at low resolution. Try resizing them to 18 × 18, the size of emoji here. I'm waiting for the SVGs to become available to see if it's much better than the resized PNGs.

We forgive you for being wrong. The emoji functionality comes from the text formatter library mentioned throughout this topic and is not a function within phpBB. If anything the attribution would be there. Won't really matter much anyways as the last few posts have been about the author of that library getting rid of emojione usage and going with something else.